Hi,
I recently had a problem at a client's site with vSphere vCenter 5.1, where the client had SQL Express which is limited to 10GB database.
This should be more than working, but the client has exploded the 10GB, where the calculator was expecting less than 3GB.
The Events and Tasks tables were faulty, and to clean up in emergency, we used the script on the blog below to clean the faulty tables.
The identify them we used the following script... [Lire la suite]

Purpose
This article provides steps to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance from 5.0.x/5.1 to 5.5.
Resolution
Notes:
vCenter Server Appliance 5.0.1, 5.1.x, and 5.5 use PostgreSQL for the embedded database, instead of IBM DB2 that was used in vCenter Server Appliance 5.0. If you use the embedded database with the vCenter Server Appliance, when you upgrade to version 5.5, the embedded IBM DB2 database is migrated to a PostgreSQL database. The configuration state of your existing database is preserved and the schema is upgraded to be... [Lire la suite]

With the recently released VMware vSphere 5.5, the component Single-Sign-On (SSO) has been completely rewritten. The biggest change is that the RSA database has been removed, which eliminates much of its complexity. There is also a new identity type (Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication)) that works without specifying the AD Controllers directly, like the old vSphere 4.x / 5.0 authentication. The whole process is much easier. This post shows how to enable Active Directory Authentication within the new vSphere 5.5... [Lire la suite]

Internally within my company, there is usually a lot of discussion about how a customer goes about managing multiple vCenter servers. With the vSphere 5.1 addition of Single Sign-On (SSO), it dramatically complicates the design itself. This topic won't mean much for SMBs because you should be pretty well off with a single vCenter and SSO instance. This is primarily going to be focused on large enterprise designs.
WARNING::: these are MY design considerations and recommendations, use at your own risk. All depicted... [Lire la suite]

A commonly requested thing that people ask for from vSphere Replication is more consolidated reporting. You can set alerts in vCenter to key off of various things that surface from vSphere Replication, but it is not exactly a consolidated list when doing so. What people are looking for is a common interface to pull together *just* vSphere Replication alerts for things like RPO violations.
My good friends and colleagues Alan Renouf and Lee Dilworth have identified a really elegant way to pull this... [Lire la suite]

The other day we received this question from a customer via Twitter:
@VMwareCares planning to upgrade to 5.1 from 5.0 vcenter. What’s recommended physical or appliance? Ups and downs side of each?
We thought a few more of you might have the same questions so we decided we would take the opportunity to explain the differences between vCenter server and vCenter appliance and under what situation which one should be opted for, over the other.
The vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is a preconfigured Linux-based... [Lire la suite]

Back on April 29th we posted an alert: ALERT: Login issue after updating to vCenter 5.1 Update 1 which detailed a scenario whereby customers might be unable to log in using the vSphere Web Client or domain username/password credentials via the vSphere Client after updating to vCenter 5.1
Tonight at 7:30pm PST, vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 will be removed from the VMware download site and will be replaced by vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a. The primary aim of the 5.1 U1a release is to address the regression that was identified... [Lire la suite]

Last month we announced a new SSL Certificate Automation tool to help everyone with the implementation of custom certificates. Yesterday, we released the second version of it (version 1.0.1). This is a minor update which aims to simplify the replacement of certificates further by adding Certificate Signing Request (CSR) functionality to the tool. This functionality allows a user to quickly generate certificate requests (and consequently the private keys) for submission to the Certificate Authority. The CSR... [Lire la suite]

With the release of vCenter 5.1 adding additional certificates into the environment to make communication between components more secure, the process of updating these certificates with customers’ own signed certificates has been a challenge.
We are pleased to announce the general availability of vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0. This tool provides an automated mechanism to replace certificates in the following components of the vCenter Server 5.1 management platform:
The tool is available now and can... [Lire la suite]